III. The Gospels.

We have already wandered into chapter two of the work before us, and come to the subject of the Incarnation of Christ. At this point our author withdraws from the concession which he had hitherto made for the sake of argument, and no more treats the Scriptures as inspired. He has now reached that stage of his argument at which he begins to assail the truth and accuracy of the Bible, and the first point attacked is the testimony of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke as to the miraculous birth of Our Lord. He now begins to make a free use of that method of inquiry with which we have become only too familiar in the present day—a method in which the inquirer accepts some part or parts of the testimony of the Evangelists, just so far as it suits his own ideas of what is likely to have been true, and rejects all that does not so commend itself to his preconceived opinion, as if he or anyone in the present day knew anything at all about the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, except what His witnesses have furnished to us. A small example of this free and independent kind of criticism may be seen in the note on pages 8 and 9 of this work, where the critic is Mr. Matthew Arnold.

Perhaps some of our readers are not accustomed to this method of dealing with the testimony of the Gospels, and the New Testament generally, as to the facts of the Life of Christ, which has become so common among modern rationalistic critics—I mean the way of accepting a part of the testimony, and rejecting the rest as incredible. To a simple mind it would seem that if we had found the Evangelists "thoroughly untrustworthy" in one part of their narrative, we cannot possibly accept as certain any other part of their testimony. But such a reader has little idea how wise and clever men of the nineteenth century are, especially in Germany.

In Germany was born that "verifying faculty" which, like some chemical test, can detect falsehood in St. Luke or St. Matthew, and can detect truth in the most spurious or puerile of the apocryphal writings. But without this verifying faculty how could we ever have such lives of Christ as those of Strauss and numerous other German critics, and, later, the more page 16 celebrated Vie de Jesus of Renan? It is by this faculty that these gifted writers have disentangled from the mass of testimony which they regard as incredible, the residuum of rational truth which they profess to give us. Really, the minuteness with which they tell the details of the story, and the confidence of their assurance that they know it better than all the four Evangelists together, make us think that they must have lived at the time, and on the spot. But it is all due to the "verifying faculty," the peculiar heritage of the nineteenth century.

The worst of it is that their stories do not agree together—not much better than those of the false witnesses who tried to make out Jesus to be something different from what He professed to be. Put them together, and they behave to each other like the mighty men of Joab and Abner, who "caught every man his fellow by the head, and thrust his sword into his fellow's side, and they all fell down together."

Well, our author has made use of this verifying faculty to overthrow the testimony of St. Matthew and St. Luke as to the birth of Christ. His second-hand criticism is not very powerful. He insists four times that the story is told by these evangelists, not in their books, but in "a preface," in each Case, to their books. Suppose we granted that the passages in question were of the nature of a preface, what then? Is a writer less careful about what he puts in his preface than about what he puts in his book? But, he adds, "with the possibility or probability of the prefaces having been inserted by others after the books were written."^* Ah ! there we are, ready to fight it out, but he must not assume what no critic has ever succeeded in establishing, or even making out to be probable.

Our author insists strongly that the miraculous birth of Our Lord is disproved by the fact—"That in all four Gospels Jesus is referred to as the actual and very son of Joseph and Mary." He dwells on the care which is taken, especially in the genealogies, to show that Joseph was a lineal descendant of David. On this subject I shall only ask one question—Was not the legal position of Our Lord as a member of the family of Joseph necessary to give Him the legal status of an heir of the house of David? Suppose His genealogy had been traced through His mother up to David, would this have given him the legal status of an heir of David? I think not, page 17 but I should like to see the question answered by someone better acquainted than I am with ancient Jewish customs. It seems to me that His legal connection with Joseph was as necessary to make Him the Son of David, as His miraculous birth was to make Him the Son of God.

Amid such wonders, why quibble at the additional wonder of a miraculous birth?